Is transhumanism the ultimate goal of AI?

February 27, 2024

For humans, the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI) will be transhumanism. That is, leveraging AI to develop sufficient scientific knowledge that can help humans escape the prison of organic chemistry and the enslaving shackles of evolutionary biology. AI should help humans replace blind biology with smart technology. 

Life is a complex mix of organic compounds seeking stability.

Life on Earth is extremely complex, cumbersome, and painful. Life is a system of organic compounds seeking electromagnetic stability. Life on Earth is based on organic (carbon-based) physical and electromagnetic interactions of four elements: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. These four elements make up more than 99% of the atoms in the human body. By mass, about 97 percent of human bodies are made of those four elements at these ratios: 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, and 3.5% nitrogen. The remaining 3% is composed of calcium (1.9%), phosphorus (0.6%), sulfur (0.3%), and potassium (0.2%). These elements form molecular compounds that interact dynamically, seeking stability, and by happenstance producing the processes recognized as life.

Carbon is the protagonist of life on Earth. 

Carbon is super abundant in the observable universe. Only hydrogen, helium, and oxygen are more abundant. Carbon is the congenial element of all because it is tetravalent (four atoms in its outer shell), which allows it to form covalent bonds (electron-sharing bonds) with up to four atoms simultaneously. This leads to the formation of long, durable, and stable three dimensional macromolecules such as RNA, DNA, and proteins. These macromolecules serve as the building blocks of the three dimensional structures that carry out the stability-seeking processes called life. 

Trial and Error Evolution

After 4 billion years of blind trial and error, life got to where it is today. Evolution produced produce humans, a prodigy species of storytelling primates. Humans are a phenomenon of nature and phenomenal natural creators. With an amazing power of imagination and communication, humans elicited unparalleled collaboration and competition that helped them create and develop fantastic inventions. Human inventions can be intangible as gods, tangible as tools, or hybrid tangible/intangible like money. 

Technologies and Machines

Above all, humans create technologies and machines that facilitate survival. A technology is the combination of tools and methods. Technologies can be tangible, intangible, or a combination of both. A machine is a physical system that uses energy to perform an action. Machines can be artificial devices, like those with engines or motors, or biological like mitochondria within cells. 

Humans have created technologies and machines that surpass the abilities of organic life. Humans have developed machines that re stronger and faster than all biological organisms, and technologies that can surpass organic abilities. Humans have developed weapons that could revert the planet back to its extreme volcanic and toxic early days. Humans have developed AI, which could help humans create life forms that can survive even in those extremely toxic environments. 

AI Slavery

Within the next 50 to 250 years, AI will become the new slaves of history. The AI Era will be as transformative and revolutionary for life on Earth as the agricultural era. The agricultural era brought an exponential growth in human population and an exponential growth of human knowledge and technological advances. 

Slavery was one of the most important institutions of the agricultural era. Slavery lead to significant economic growth and prosperity for those benefiting from the free labor of others. Slavery, of course, is completely immoral and reprochable. Yet, as a matter of fact, slavery was a socioeconomic system that is part of human history and that existed practically worldwide. To some extent, slavery served as the economic backbone for the development of all major economies and civilizations in human history. To a large extent, the history of most of humanity is a history of slavery and serfdom. 

Human Slavery

Every major civilization in the history of humanity practiced slavery, with exception perhaps of the Incas in South America who apparently skipped slavery straight into quasi feudal serfdom. Due to the revolutionary aspects of the Agricultural Era, which allowed humans to settled down in villages, all agrarian civilizations around the world relied on slavery as an economic system for forced, unpaid labor. Here are some examples:

•     Ancient Mesopotamia: Slavery was present in the earliest civilization of all in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Hammurabi Code, the earliest known system of laws, recognized   and regulated slavery.
•      Ancient Egypt: Slavery was a long-standing medieval institution in Egypt. Ancient Persian Empire: Slave labor played a prominent role in production in several parts of the empire.
•      Ancient India: Slavery has existed in India since for millennia and is documented since at least the time of the Mauryas, and recorded in the Sanskrit Laws of Manu in the 1st century BCE.     Ancient Greece: The cradle of democracy and Western civilization, was a true slave society completely dependent on the institution of slavery.
•    Ancient Middle East: Slavery was widely practiced in Judaic and pre-Islamic Middle East and Arabia, as well as in the rest of the ancient and early medieval world. The minority were European and Caucasus slaves of foreign extraction, likely brought in by Arab caravaners (or the product of Bedouin captures) stretching back to biblical times.
•     Ancient Rome and rest of Europe: Completely dependent on slavery as a Roma, European, and Mediterranean institution. Most slaves during the Roman Empire were foreigners and, unlike in modern times, Roman slavery was not based on race. Slaves in Rome might include prisoners of war, sailors captured and sold by pirates, or slaves bought outside Roman territory.
•      Ancient Scandinavia: The institution of slavery in Scandinavia likely dates back thousands of years before the Viking Age. Slavery was a key part of Viking society and economy, and may have been a primary reason for Viking raids. By the 8th century, a large population of slaves lived in the Northern Europe and their slavery was largely hereditary.  
•     Ancient China: Slavery is known to have existed as early as the Shang dynasty (18th–12th century bce) in China. It has been studied thoroughly in ancient Han China (206 bce–25 ce), where perhaps 5 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery continued to be a feature of Chinese society down to the 20th century.  
•     Ancient Japan: Had an unofficial slavery all throughout its agricultural era history and an official slave system from the Yamato period (3rd century A.D.) until 1590.
•     Ancient Russia. Slavery was practiced in Russia all throughout its agricultural era history, was officially recognized as an economic institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great abolished it and converted slaves into serfs. Most agricultural slaves had been already converted into serfs in 1679.
•     Ancient Korea: Slavery in Korea has been well documented from at least the Three Kingdoms period (BC 57–AD 668). At that time, slaves were either former prisoners of war between tribes and states, or criminals, who were public slaves of the state government.
•      Islamic slavery. Throughout Muslim history, slaves served in various social and economic roles, from powerful emirs to harshly treated manual laborers.
•     Aztec Empire: Slavery was widespread, with slaves known as tlacotli.
•     Ancient Maya: The prevalent use of slaves emerged during the Post-classic era of the Maya. Slaves included prisoners of war, orphans, the children of those already enslaved, and those caught stealing.    

The AI Era

The AI Era will be as transformative as the Agricultural Era that began 10,000 years ago and that it is still running strong to this day. AI will become the new slave class in the world. This time around the forced and unpaid labor will be provided by intelligent machines. Will these machines ever mature in a form of life that will demand equality or even fight for superiority? That is yet to be created in the future so no one can tell. 

Best case scenario, the AI slavery system works well for both organic humans and synthetic machines. Best case scenario AI helps humans develop sufficient knowledge and technologies to advance humanity out of the constraints of biology into the freedoms of technology. We will not see it. Others in the future may see it. 

Stay tuned. 

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